Vice President Joe Biden insists that private ownership of so-called assault weapons should be forbidden because police “are outgunned on the street by the bad guys and the proliferation of these weapons.” He also claims that the number of deadly assaults against police officers has increased in recent years.

In fact, duty-related deaths of police officers declined in 2012 as compared to the previous year, continuing a decades-long trend. And there wasn’t a single instance in which a police officer was killed by someone using a so-called assault weapon. Just as importantly, law-abiding citizens, by definition, do not use so-called assault weapons to murder police officers, or anybody else.

Biden maintains that the proposed assault weapons ban is “a rational limitation on what types of weapons can be owned.” If that is the case, why not apply that ban to the police as well as the public? Many – if not most – of the so-called assault weapons used in crime are stolen from the police, rather than from responsible private gun owners. Yet the same federal government that seeks to ban private ownership of assault weapons continues to send military-grade weaponry to local police departments.

There is nothing rational, moral, or practical about disarming the innocent.